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On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:41:25 +0000 Rob Beard <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 10/01/2009 18:52, Brown Richard wrote: > > Hi > > > > Some friends have been given a couple of lovely pink Elonex Netbooks. > > > > > > No I don't know much about this product. It is a MIPS architecture but not directly compatible with the current Debian MIPS port (or the mipsel port). There are maybe 30 variants of MIPS. > >The os doesn't seem to play > > youtube (something teenage girls want) and of course msn. Would you > > suggest loading xubuntu or something different or is it possible to > > get flash playing etc. No. You can recompile gnash to work on the device once you have a working free software OS on the machine or a cross-building toolchain for that variant of MIPS on a faster machine but Flash is proprietary and there is no possible way of compiling it for this or any platform not supported by those with access to the source code. As ever, access to the source code is everything. You have it with Gnash, you do not with Flash. If you happen to use an architecture that Adobe can't be bothered to support, tough. There is absolutely no prospect of getting any flavour of Ubuntu on it, nor Fedora. The only distro with much chance is probably Debian but even that isn't straightforward. With suitable changes, it is apparently possible to get Debian onto the machine, albeit with a few rebuilds of critical packages. It is not a trivial task - at the time I had expected a group of maybe four or five Debian Developers to need maybe a year to get it working properly. With recent improvements within Emdebian, that time could be reduced but only at the expense of removing the "simple" tasks and leaving only the complex tasks. > Sadly they don't appear to have x86 compatible CPUs, they use some sort > of RISC arcitecture instead (which I believe is MIPS based): > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elonex_ONEt It's not at all sad, x86 is a horrible architecture - it comes fully loaded with a nightmare of legacy code like the need for BIOS and memory management workarounds. Sensible architectures don't have a need for black magic like that. IMHO, it would have been far better if Apple had been willing and able to continue development of the powerpc architecture instead of going backwards to the x86 but money talks, at least for hardware. > You may be able to get the MIPS version of Debian running on it, No. I did ask the Elonex people about obtaining precisely this machine so that some work could be done on it to derive the particular kernel configuration and toolchain tweaks to build a free OS for the machine. Linux does run on the machine but only using their own configurations which are not being released at the moment. > not > sure if anything like XMMS is included in the MIPS version of Debian. xmms is a gtk1.2 application and has been removed (it remains in Etch but will not be in Lenny) - a long overdue change. Other players exist for gtk2.0 in Debian. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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